On Travel

Letter to a favorite old professor, sent 3/29/2020.

I just read one of your favorite passages in The Mayor of Casterbridge, after Mrs. Henchard dies. I don’t know if you remember, but you inscribed it in the Hardy biography you gifted me: “And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened…” Its another example of a line I appreciate more as I grow older.

Thank you for the Dorchester photos. For once, I can actually reciprocate: on that class trip to England, Chelsea F____ and I made a deal that if I went to Charles Dickens’ house with her, she would take a train to Dorchester with me to see Hardy’s home. (I’m sure you had her in class at some point; she’s wearing pink in the foreground of the photo I’m attaching. The six of us were in an Indian restaurant around 1 AM because all of London’s pubs closed at midnight.) Max Gate was a private residence then and I assume is now, but I had emailed the owners and found that though it wasn’t officially open for tours that day, they were offering a talk for a group that we were welcome to attend. The second attachment is the fireplace inside. They had set up several chairs for attendees, and since we weren’t technically part of the group, we sat along the back wall in two other chairs. Mid-talk, the host explained that almost none of the furniture was original—except for the chairs Chelsea and I had chosen to be out of the way (third attachment). Attachment four is the gravestone for Hardy’s dog. I seem to recall that it once bit George Bernard Shaw.

I do not recall visiting Grey’s Bridge, but I definitely went to the Roman amphitheater where Henchard met his wife for the first time in eighteen years. It’s strange to be on flat ground with those high slopes surrounding, and standing there made that secret meeting in the novel feel all the more real (attachment five).

Looking through the photographs I felt wistful, not for my college years or for that particular trip, but travel in general. We drove up the east side of Keuka Lake today. Especially knowing that a stimulus check will be on the way from the guvmint, we wanted to patronize a local winery and an ice cream restaurant through curbside service, but mostly, we wanted to stir forth and see the lake. We plan to make a ritual of driving somewhere each weekend during this time of closures, even if we just drive around for 45 minutes, so we can feel like we’ve gone somewhere.

Our trips in recent times have not been exotic, but they’ve mattered to me. We got the girls to Boston twice in the past year. Much more locally, we had planned a family outing to Rochester in April to see Cats on tour. I was to perform a wedding ceremony for some friends in Colorado in July. Our tentative plan had been to fly to Chicago and spend a couple days there, then take a train into Denver. Thanks to coronavirus and the bride’s changed employment circumstances, that wedding and trip are indefinitely postponed. For the last few years, we’ve gone to New York City one or twice per year and stayed with friends in the north of Manhattan. I do not know when we’ll next feel secure visiting the city, or when we’ll meet their newborn.

This will pass and we will travel again, but I wonder if it will feel the same. I might feel even more grateful for the privilege of travel; I might feel unable to stop wondering what viruses float through the restaurant or plane or theatre. Will I be more eager to travel outside my county, or more reluctant? And when will that happen? My parents have traveled extensively since their retirements. They want to be there when the girls experience Yellowstone for the first time, so we were slated to go together next summer. That all feels distant now. I’ve never been to the Blue Ridge Mountains or Monticello. Daphne has asked to go to Washington, D.C. since she was four, and we had kicked around a trip this May. My brother and I planned a jaunt to Philadelphia for a concert. I’ve been to Chicago once, with the Student Managed Investment Fund in college, and instead of going to the Art Institute of Chicago across the street, I dutifully attended a seminar on careers in finance. I’ve been waiting years to rectify that error.

All of that is on hold, which I suppose is fine. Yet it’s still lost time. One of the last things my grandmother said to me was, “Travel while you’re young.” There are obviously much more serious tragedies in the world right now. But in some moments I still feel cheated, and I look wistfully through photographs of old trips.

I do think I’m more temperamentally suited to sheltering in place than a lot of others. My favorite hobbies involve movies, keyboards, and novels. Recently I shared my reading list with Sara, who joked, “Time enough at last, huh?” I laughed, apocalyptic nature of the allusion notwithstanding, but there’s also truth to it. I’ve often looked at our shelves and wondered how I would find the time to read all I want to read; it seems not unlikely that on my deathbed someday I’ll think, “But I never actually read The Satanic Verses!” It’s been fun, and comforting, to revisit Thomas Hardy’s world; I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time in 20 years because it’s been assigned to ninth graders during the school closure; and I feel like I pulled off quite a coup in getting Hilary Mantel’s recently-released end of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy from the library before the whole system closed (meaning our due date has been extended. Have you read Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies? They’re wonderful.)

So I’ll read a lot, and write a lot, and watch my share of movies. We’ll periodically drive past Keuka Lake. We’ll make the most of this bizarre time. And I’ll be very glad when it’s over.